Boccaccio at 700: Tales and Afterlives An Introductionhttps://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.holmes.html
<p>By Olivia Holmes, Dana E. Stewart</p>
The articles in this issue of Mediaevalia stem primarily from the plenary addresses at the April 2013 conference “Boccaccio at 700: Medieval Contexts and Global Intertexts,” hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Binghamton University, in honor of the seven hundredth anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). In keeping with the collaborative spirit of CEMERS, this conference was conceived as an interdisciplinary forum in which to rethink all aspects of the great Italian writer’s work, as well as the numerous fields touched by his legacy. In the course of his lifetime, Boccaccio was a merchant-banker, courtier, scribe, philologist, mythographer, geographer, literary scholar ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.holmes.html">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2015-08-02T04:00:29-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/images/journals/coverImages/mdicoversmall.jpgBoccaccio at 700: Tales and Afterlives An Introduction2014-09-26text/htmlen-USThe Johns Hopkins University PressBoccaccio at 700: Tales and Afterlives An Introduction2014-09-262014TWOProject MUSE®02014-09-26T00:00:00-05:002014-09-26Boccaccio’s Neapolitan Letter and Multilingualism in Angevin Napleshttps://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.lee.html
<p>By Charmaine Lee</p>
In Decameron 3.6.4, Boccaccio describes Naples as a “città antichissima e forse così dilettevole, o più, come ne sia alcuna altra in Italia [ancient city… which is perhaps as delectable a city as any to be found in Italy],” thus expressing his admiration for the city he lived in as a young man.1 His years in Naples (1327–1340/41) were to influence most of his work from the Caccia di Diana (1334–37) to De casi­ bus virorum illustrium, which was dedicated to Mainardo Cavalcanti, military commander of the Duchy of Amalfi, and, on his final visit to Naples in 1370–71, he gave a copy of the Genealogie deorum gen­ tilium, a work in part based on texts he had consulted in Robert’s library, to his Neapolitan friend Pietro ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.lee.html">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2015-08-02T04:00:29-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/images/journals/coverImages/mdicoversmall.jpgBoccaccio’s Neapolitan Letter and Multilingualism in Angevin Naples2014-09-26text/htmlen-USThe Johns Hopkins University PressBoccaccio’s Neapolitan Letter and Multilingualism in Angevin NaplesBoccaccio, Giovanni,2014-09-262014TWOProject MUSE®02014-09-26T00:00:00-05:002014-09-26The Marquis of Saluzzo, or the Griselda Story Before It Was Hijacked Calculating Matrimonial Odds in Decameron 10.10https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.barolini.html
<p>By Teodolinda Barolini</p>
In this article I propose to read the last story of the Decameron as the story not of Griselda, but of Gualtieri, the Marquis of Saluzzo. So indeed does Boccaccio present it in his summary:Il marchese di Sanluzzo da’ prieghi de’ suoi uomini costretto di pigliar moglie, per prenderla a suo modo piglia una figliuola d’un villano, della quale ha due figliuoli, li quali le fa veduto d’uccidergli; poi, mostrando lei essergli rincresciuta e avere altra moglie presa a casa faccendosi ritornare la propria figliuola come se sua moglie fosse, lei avendo in camiscia cacciata e a ogni cosa trovandola paziente, piú cara che mai in casa tornatalasi, i suoi figliuoli grandi le mostra e come marchesana l’onora e fa onorare.[The ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.barolini.html">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2015-08-02T04:00:29-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/images/journals/coverImages/mdicoversmall.jpgThe Marquis of Saluzzo, or the Griselda Story Before It Was Hijacked Calculating Matrimonial Odds in Decameron 10.102014-09-26text/htmlen-USThe Johns Hopkins University PressThe Marquis of Saluzzo, or the Griselda Story Before It Was Hijacked Calculating Matrimonial Odds in Decameron 10.102014-09-262014TWOProject MUSE®02014-09-26T00:00:00-05:002014-09-26Scienze della cittade Rhetoric and Politics in the Sixth Day of the Decameronhttps://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.martinez.html
<p>By Ronald Martinez</p>
Boccaccio’s Day 6 is a “mercurial” day, not only in its display of effective use of the spoken word, as befits Mercury’s status as messenger and speaker, so often reiterated in the Genealogie deorum gentilium,1 but also in the influence of the mercurial horoscope on human ingenuity:2 from mechanical skills such as cookery, three times represented in the day (Cisti, Chichibìo, and La Nuta), to the arts of grammar (Forese’s abicì), the art of preaching (Fra Cipolla), and the art of storytelling (Madonna Oretta), to activities reliant on the trivium such as law (Forese, the trial of Monna Filippa), and a newly prestigious artisanal occupation, painting (Giotto).3 Even illicit “arts” such as the counterfeiting by ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.martinez.html">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2015-08-02T04:00:29-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/images/journals/coverImages/mdicoversmall.jpgScienze della cittade Rhetoric and Politics in the Sixth Day of the Decameron2014-09-26text/htmlen-USThe Johns Hopkins University PressScienze della cittade Rhetoric and Politics in the Sixth Day of the Decameron2014-09-262014TWOProject MUSE®02014-09-26T00:00:00-05:002014-09-26Authorial Strategies and Manuscript Tradition Boccaccio and the Decameron’s Early Diffusionhttps://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.cursi.html
<p>By Marco Cursi</p>
The manuscript material that can be directly attributed to Boccaccio’s hand is extraordinarily rich: thirty-four autographs, among them twenty-two manuscripts, integrally or partially written by him, a private letter, and eleven manuscripts with his annotations in the margins.1 Only three manuscripts are actually signed by Boccaccio, namely:The Laurenziano Pluteo 33. 31, transcribed between 1338 and 1348,2 containing a Miscellanea latina in which, on f. 16v., we can read: “Feliciter Iohannes [Successfully, John]”;The Ambrosiano A 204 inferior, which can be dated around 1340–45, in which Boccaccio transcribed the apparatus of the glosses by Thomas Aquinas to Aristotele’s Ethics, at the end of which we read: ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.cursi.html">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2015-08-02T04:00:29-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/images/journals/coverImages/mdicoversmall.jpgAuthorial Strategies and Manuscript Tradition Boccaccio and the Decameron’s Early Diffusion2014-09-26text/htmlen-USThe Johns Hopkins University PressAuthorial Strategies and Manuscript Tradition Boccaccio and the Decameron’s Early DiffusionBoccaccio, Giovanni,2014-09-262014TWOProject MUSE®02014-09-26T00:00:00-05:002014-09-26Illuminating Boccaccio Visual Translation in Early Fifteenth-Century Francehttps://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.hedeman.html
<p>By Anne D. Hedeman</p>
In late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Paris, interaction between members of the chancellery, the university community, and the royal family generated a rich intellectual climate in which visual and textual translation flourished and were inextricably intertwined in books made for royalty and members of the nobility.1 Contact with Italian literature at the papal court in Avignon at the turn of the fifteenth century sparked interest in translating Boccaccio’s work for the French courtly elite. Because of the popularity of illuminated manuscripts among the elite, translators drawn from the French chancellery sought to shape the reception of translations of Boccaccio through the interaction between ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.hedeman.html">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2015-08-02T04:00:29-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/images/journals/coverImages/mdicoversmall.jpgIlluminating Boccaccio Visual Translation in Early Fifteenth-Century France2014-09-26text/htmlen-USThe Johns Hopkins University PressIlluminating Boccaccio Visual Translation in Early Fifteenth-Century FranceIllumination of books and manuscripts2014-09-262014TWOProject MUSE®02014-09-26T00:00:00-05:002014-09-26Boccaccio, Ariosto, and the European Novelhttps://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.bigazzi.html
<p>By Roberto Bigazzi</p>
One of the major achievements of recent criticism about the Decameron has been to highlight the connection between the frame story—the cornice—and the novelle. This interplay fosters the inner voyage of education of the brigata. As a consequence, the Decameron goes beyond the simple collection of tales. Ariosto understood such a structural interaction, interweaving his main story with fourteen interspersed novellas, equally distributed between the two parts of his Orlando Furioso. The various aspects of Ariosto’s novellas—adventurous, comic, erotic, tragic—are played in opposition (of characters, tones, and genres) to what happens in the main plot, adding to the similar opposition obtained through the intertwining ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.bigazzi.html">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2015-08-02T04:00:29-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/images/journals/coverImages/mdicoversmall.jpgBoccaccio, Ariosto, and the European Novel2014-09-26text/htmlen-USThe Johns Hopkins University PressBoccaccio, Ariosto, and the European NovelNovelle2014-09-262014TWOProject MUSE®02014-09-26T00:00:00-05:002014-09-26The Apocryphal Boccacciohttps://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.kirkham.html
<p>By Victoria Kirkham</p>
All worthy poets are magnets that attract orphaned writings in search of an author. As lodestones, they also draw legendary accretions to their life stories. With the passing of time, poets puff up, pulling into their personal space apocryphal works, specious biographical anecdotes, and fanciful portraits. Who was more deserving than Homer to have thrust upon him a third epic, the Batrachomyomachia (batrachos + mus + machia = frog-mouse war)? Actually, an epic parody of the Iliad, this amusing battle of small creatures first appeared, attributed to Homer, printed at Brescia (1474?), then at Venice in 1486.1 Virgil for centuries, up into the twentieth, enjoyed a surplus of verse in the Appendix vergiliana. Short ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.kirkham.html">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2015-08-02T04:00:29-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/images/journals/coverImages/mdicoversmall.jpgThe Apocryphal Boccaccio2014-09-26text/htmlen-USThe Johns Hopkins University PressThe Apocryphal BoccaccioBoccaccio, Giovanni,2014-09-262014TWOProject MUSE®02014-09-26T00:00:00-05:002014-09-26Marriage or Politics? Dramatizing Griseldahttps://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.smarr.html
<p>By Janet Levarie Smarr</p>
The final tale of Boccaccio’s Decameron, that of Griselda and Gualtieri, presents a double relationship: one is husband and wife, the other a ruler and his peasant subject. Boccaccio’s narrator Dioneo emphasizes both aspects of the relationship, calling attention first to rulers who “would be better employed as swineherds than as rulers of men,”1 and then to wives who, when mistreated, may find a lover who will treat them better.It is remarkable how many playwrights sought to dramatize this story, given that most of the narrative consists of two people who, across a largely uneventful and unnarrated span of more than a dozen years, are never in conflict.2 Granted, the final scene, with its ampler assembly and ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.smarr.html">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2015-08-02T04:00:29-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/images/journals/coverImages/mdicoversmall.jpgMarriage or Politics? Dramatizing Griselda2014-09-26text/htmlen-USThe Johns Hopkins University PressMarriage or Politics? Dramatizing Griselda2014-09-262014TWOProject MUSE®02014-09-26T00:00:00-05:002014-09-26“Alcuna paroletta piú liberale” Contemporary Women Authors Address the Decameron’s Obscenityhttps://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.psaki.html
<p>By F. Regina Psaki</p>
The Decameron repeatedly thematizes its own attention to the status of women. What is the role or function of that attention in the text? Is Boccaccio a sympathizer who wants to explore the condition, limitations, and potential of women in his society as a useful end in itself? Is he using the status of women as a way to explore other epistemological questions around language, narrative, genre, sexual difference, the body personal, and the body politic?1 In the addresses to the reader in the Proem, the Introduction to Day 4, and the so-called Author’s Conclusion,2 Boccaccio explores the restriction of behavior and speech in his frame narrative through the construction of licit and proper female behavior and ... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mediaevalia/v034/34.psaki.html">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2015-08-02T04:00:29-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/images/journals/coverImages/mdicoversmall.jpg“Alcuna paroletta piú liberale” Contemporary Women Authors Address the Decameron’s Obscenity2014-09-26text/htmlen-USThe Johns Hopkins University Press“Alcuna paroletta piú liberale” Contemporary Women Authors Address the Decameron’s ObscenityWomen authors2014-09-262014TWOProject MUSE®02014-09-26T00:00:00-05:002014-09-26